In an earlier post,
Drawing as Testimony, I referred to drawings done by an ex principal of the Art College, Eric Taylor, made when he was a War Artist. The human condition is such that we are always entering a time of war and the role of artists and drawing, is still I think something worth exploring, and in a time when social media seems to dominate communication, drawing might be one of the few ways to slow down how we reflect upon what we do to ourselves.
Drawing made on experiencing Belsen concentration camp: Feliks Topolski 1945
Mazen Kerbaj sketchbook pages
'Beirut Won't Cry'
I'm always interested in the relationship between the production of art and its dissemination. Because Kerbaj's work is printed in black and white, it can be easily disseminated. As 'Beirut Won't Cry' was put together in a diary format, it was a straightforward task to take two of his books and cut the pages out, so that all the images became 'released' back into the world. Sometimes his work was shown using the original drawings, in which case they would be framed and presented as you would expect for an art exhibition. This more traditional format suits museums, such as in the example immediately below, however when needing to show the work out in the streets, the simple expedient of the images being taken out of his book and then being attached to pegs on a washing line would do. Each presentation format reaching different audiences and eliciting I would presume very different responses.
The New Museum: New York
The street of Madrid
The streets of Barcelona
I went to a 'Situation Leeds' meeting last night at the Hyde Park Book Club, which was focused on how the city could once again become host to a wide range of art practices, which would be presented/performed/shown in situations and places that were outside of the normal gallery environments; which is probably why I was reminded of the times when Kerbaj's work was hung in the streets using washing lines. There was also an opening of the Wrangthorn Enquirer, an exhibition of work designed to reflect upon the Hyde Park area and which would be integrated into the streets by poster and flyer inserts during the time of the exhibition. The meeting and opening neatly coincided, as the work on display was a clear example of what was possible.
From the Wrangthorn Enquirer exhibition: Hyde Park Book Club: Leeds
Although not about war, the exhibition was a reminder of how news reaches us about war and other 'news worthy' events. Usually the media only focuses on the worst of our lives, and the Wrangthorn Enquirer response, is an attempt to show that what is actually happening is always far more complicated and that humour and just plain oddness are always there if we look for it, and without these things life could feel as if it is too dreadful to face.
When making art that acts as some sort of witness to a traumatic event, there will always be an issue about 'taking sides'. Arguments will proliferate about which side of a conflict's views are being represented, but at the end of the day, the reality is that the images we see of any situation are the response of one human being to finding themselves there. If they are living in the area that is being bombed, they will see the situation from the viewpoint of those being bombed, being a witness comes with all the problems associated with having to deal with the situation that has been witnessed.
Kerbaj has a new book out, 'Gaza in My Phone'. This time he has made drawings in response to social media images of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. I work in ink, and like many artists who do, often regard the process a little like developing a sensitive divining rod. Keep drawing and eventually the drawings will just draw themselves. Kerbaj is able to distill, from the images that arrive daily on his mobile phone, some sort of humane understanding of a process that is perhaps beyond understanding. There is an ideological shroud that has been drawn over Gaza, that makes it hard to look at what is going on there with any clarity and it is also a disaster that paradoxically I feel the media is somehow asking us to forget; information overload makes it harder and harder to hold on to any sort of reality.
Drawing inscribes things, it puts ideas down on paper and as it does it externalises them, and therefore forms a particular type of memory. Photographs somehow don't seem as real, and now that they come alongside A1 software, we become more and more suspicious of what they represent. 'Gaza in My Phone' recognises the new reality that faces all of us, that so much of our life experience now comes modified and focused by our mobile phone screens. Kerbaj, like myself, is getting daily updates on his phone about what is happening and he will, again like myself, be getting some sort of algorithm inflected stream of images to look at, a fact that means that whatever information he is receiving, it will already have been filtered, in one way or another. We always knew that reporting was to some extent biased, whether this was unconscious or conscious, but we used to have an idea that there was somewhere a measure of some sort that could allow us to test out the degree of bias; I'm not sure that exists anymore.
Algorithms have been running for years now in relation to myself. Every book, every ticket for an exhibition or concert, every plane ticket or accommodation paid for, has been sifted and graded as to how likely I might buy a similar experience again. My posts on all the media platforms will have been analysed and again assessed as to what I am more likely to buy, in relation to my various views on the world. If it is seen that I'm interested in culture, I'm inundated with adverts about travel to Venice or other cultural hot spots. Above all what the algorithms are doing are gradually bringing together an idea of who and what I am. They filter the world in terms of myself, so that eventually all the books, images, experiences, points of view and whatever else is out there, begin to coincide with what I feel the world should look like, simply because some algorithm has decided I wouldn't like something or other. Therefore my computer and my phone, whether I like it or not, are giving me a particular, slanted view on life, which there will be an obvious tendency for me to agree with.
When Joseph Beuys came to the old Jacob Kramer college whilst he had a drawing exhibition in the Leeds Art Gallery in 1982, he gathered the students together and told them to stop painting and to go out and buy all the different newspapers and read them all. In particular to read the ones that were written from points of view they did not agree with. Guardian readers were made to read the Mail, Sun readers the Mirror and all the other types of magazine literature such as Private Eye and Horse and Hounds, were to be thrown into the pot. We then questioned the students on what they were finding out. What the students realised was that people fed themselves news based on what their interests were. The world was out there for all people to experience, but people preferred to use media to reassure them that their take on it was the right one. Socialists read the Socialist Worker, as it offered them constant reaffirmation as to why the system was so unfair and needed changing, whilst the reading of Horse and Hounds reaffirmed how important your horse's welfare was and that the most significant dates to remember coincided with the best horse trials. We need to be part of the 'tribe' we belong to and the media offers us as many possibilities to fit in as there are 'tribes'. Capitalism then fills each slot up with things to buy that reinforce your idea of yourself. We buy the Sun because we see ourselves as a Sun reader, which is an idea that goes much wider than the newspaper.
The Sun targets the lower middle social classes, most of whom haven’t attended higher education. Two thirds of its readers are over 35 years old, 54% are male and its biggest audience share comes from the C2DE demographic. N.b. C2DE refers to the three lower social and economic groups in the UK. The Sun is written for a reading age of 8 years old. Using words in bold, lots of visuals and smaller chunks of text means they are purposefully making their product accessible to everyone and especially appealing to members of our society who have weaker literacy skills. (Nb this is not a measure of intelligence, just type of approach to literacy; most of the people I used to work with in the steel works never read books, but they were smart and witty and could think with their hands).The Sun's editorial policy is focused on stories that are often critical of elite groups and political stories are often framed around issues affecting ‘normal’ families and the idea of 'normal' and 'not normal' is often used as a measurement of whether or not something is right or wrong. I.e. is this something we would like to make part of our family or tribe or something we would exclude? This is no different to how many of the other newspapers operate, there is the term "Guardian reader", which is used to imply a stereotype of a person with modern progressive, left-wing or "politically correct" views. I would be put into that class, as the Guardian is one of the very few newspapers I ever buy and read and my views would be seen as left of centre. This doesn't mean I am more or less right about things, it does not mean the Guardian is more or less right about things either, it simply means I feel more comfortable with certain viewpoints, and how they are expressed, especially ones that suggest there could be alternative answers to the world's issues. I have always been a 'what if?' person, "introverted intuition" (IN) personality type, rather than a 'let's do it! "extraverted sensing" (ES) one. Social media relies on these differences and feeds them, so that gradually what just felt a bit more comfortable, becomes a certainty and right. This is how positions are formed and when a group with one way of thinking has power, it can believe that it is right to impose that way of thinking on everybody else. What is always needed are checks and balances, to ensure that no one way of thinking predominates. The reason we as a species have such a range of personality types is probably because the tribe needed them. We need leaders and information gatherers, fighters and nurturers, empaths and artists and at various different times we need to be able to work together.
Charley's War
When my son was a boy he followed the Charley's War stories that had been first printed in the comic 'Battle Picture Weekly' and which were then continued in 'The Eagle'.
The strip follows Charley's life in the trenches and his experiences during the first world war and was an extremely graphic portrayal of the horrors of it. The writer Pat Mills added a political slant to the strip, that had not been seen before in British war comics and the artist Joe Colquhoun, drew the black and white images with an appropriate texture that reminded me of the way horror fiction was drawn for American EC comics in the 1950s. There were none of the heroics that I had come across in my own war comics reading when I was a boy.
Charley's War: Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun
This reflection on war was made 70 years after the event, long enough away from the war to enable its reality to be at last confronted. The War Picture Library comic books I read as a boy, had a totally different take on war. It was of course the second world war that was depicted, the one my father had been conscripted into and the British troops were always wise cracking heroes and the enemy evil. These comics also had adverts in them and they were often concerned with what it was to be a man.
The War Picture Library
Charles Atlas
Charles Atlas still figures large in my imagination. His "Dynamic Tension" method of body building was a physical training method emphasising the pitting of one muscle group against another to build strength. I remember at one point in the early 1960s my father took up a course and I'm reminded of the concept every time to go to a Pilates session. The comics of my boyhood were mini-training manuals for what it was thought I would need to be like as a man. There were no women in these comics, just camaraderie, the idea of loyalty, of what bravery consisted of and of how you needed to conduct yourself within a troop of other men when at war.
Drawing by Hugo Pratt
Some of the illustrators for the War Picture Library were very good, Hugo Pratt the great Italian creator of the Corto Maltese comics, cut his teeth on drawing for War Picture Library. For boys like myself they were a constant source of information as to how you could graphically represent the world, just using black and white mark making techniques. When I'm trying to draw any sort of explosion of energy, or invent a patch of land, part of my hand memory will always be based on copies I made in pencil of the images I found in these comics. I wish I had been told at the time that artists drew these with fine brushes and black ink and that they were drawn slightly larger and reduced down in size for reproduction.
Yet again I find myself weaving together personal history, drawing and how I relate to it, with reflections on what makes the world the sort of place it is. When I initially saw Kerbau's work, I immediately thought of George Grosz. Many of you might be puzzled by that, as their work looks very different, but I'll try and explain.
Grosz: Wartime slaughter watched by bureaucratic overseers
After being in the German army for two years Grotz became so distressed by the experience that in 1917 he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide. He ended up in a military hospital, under the care of which he recovered, only to find that the authorities had on his recovery decided to execute him, as an example to others that death was no way to escape war. A wealthy patron of his, Count Kessler, finally intervened and the death sentence was commuted, he was from this point a walking dead man. Grosz: The everyday reality of war.
Within the grip of warfare death is an everyday reality. In Europe during the First World War the sight of a dead body, washed up on the side of a river near you was the new normal, in Gaza, children now write their names on their arms, so that people will know who they were if they are killed, another new normal. Born in Lebanon in 1975, Kerbaj spent the first 15 years of his life living amongst a war. "It was, 'That is a shoe, that is rain, that is the sound of a bomb,'" he stated. "It seemed natural", it had become normal.
From: 'Gaza in My Phone'
Mazen Kerbaj now lives in Berlin and responds to what is happening in Gaza by interacting with social media. George Grosz moved to New York from Berlin during the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. Both artists eventually working at some remove from the situations that first impelled them to make work.
Disturbed While Eating (1947), George Grosz
Grosz was by far the more troubled man. Surviving suicide, only to be told that you are now going to be executed, must mangle your inner psyche and the image above made in the relative safety of the USA after the end of the second world war, really does feel as if it was made by someone who knew what starvation was all about.
I am also at some remove from any war zone. In the safety of my room here in Leeds I can watch endless hours of war news footage and no matter how much empathy I might feel I have, I can't really understand what is happening.
I respond, because I have to. As an artist I can't shut my eyes, but how powerful or useful my responses are I'm not sure. Kerbaj is a voice of resistance, Grosz a reminder of the fact that it is always the poor and the ordinary people that suffer most during wartime and that the rich, nearly always escape. Both artists tell me in their different ways that there is something insane and totally illogical about war.
In my own work, constant media footage of devastated towns has finally found its way into my image banks and I have made a lot of drawings, several of which have been turned into prints.
Drawings
I was trying to come to terms with the empty shells of buildings and the human lives they represented. For each and every family, be this in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Iran or Israel, when your home is destroyed and your family attacked, the trauma is terrible, media arguments as to whether or not one side or the other has right on their side, in no way alleviate the pain and suffering of those on the ground.
Unknown soldier
Around the edges of war news footage are always soldiers, hanging about, just being there, as if waiting for the film crew to leave, so that they can get on with the reality of war. I sometimes try and draw these men in the brief moments of their appearance, as some sort of way to give them a life, to release them from their electronic media existence.
Unknown soldiers
As I drew these images I was reminded of my first encounter with drawn images of soldiers in comic books for boys and I began to doubt whether my experience of life, had prepared me to take on image making that could do justice to the situation. My life has never exposed me to the harsh realities of war, but even so, I have made a body of work about it and still occasionally still do make images based on my responses to how the media presents war. It is my own way of attempting some sort of connection with something that the media always seems to disconnect me from. Above all, I have this feeling that the further away from war's reality we think we are, the more the possibility grows of its dark tentacles spreading out and engulfing everything and everybody and that it will one day arrive on our doorsteps totally unannounced.
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